“Always Hold the Reader’s Hand”: Adam Ross, in Conversation With Taffy Brodesser-Akner

In the words of its author, Adam Ross, Playworld is a novel that perhaps shouldn’t work right now. It’s not entirely clear how the 500-page semi-autobiographical tour-de-force, revolving around an affair between its 14-year-old protagonist and a 36-year-old married woman, became one of this year’s must-reads. Ross, previously best known for his 2010 novel Mr. Peanut, handles his thorny subject matter with a deft attention to his protagonist’s false sense of mundanity, framing nothing about Griffin’s existence as out of the ordinary. In a Salinger-esque manner, the young man is let loose to traverse the extravagant geography of 1980s Manhattan. He funds his Upper West Side private school education through acting gigs and has trysts with his married girlfriend in the back of her silver Mercedes. Only a teenager, Griffin lacks the language to describe what is happening to him, and Ross does not make the disingenuous effort to give him this language. “Playworld rhymes with my life,” the author revealed to fellow novelist Taffy Brodesser-Akner when the two got together in Manhattan last month. “Griffin and I share setting, professional milieu, and certain interests. But the abuse I and some of my cohorts suffered went on longer than in the book.” Below, the two writers delve into their own experiences growing up in “cortisol city,” Ross’s elegant rendering of the “New York Sublime,” and, of course, whether or not they read their reviews.—JULIETTE JEFFERS

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TAFFY AKNER: How long were you working on Playworld for? 

ADAM ROSS: 10 years. I mean, I wrote the prologue in 2014. That’s when I was like, “Okay, we’ve officially started.” I had sold the book a solid year before then, based on 70 pages of Griffin when he was 33. It’s 1999, and his life is falling apart. But when you work on a book for that long, your sense of the book’s place vis-a-vis the cultural conversation just gets obliterated. I mean, A, you’re just trying to survive your battle with your own novel. And then B, there’s just an interesting way in which works of art enter the culture and are freighted with their own temporality. 

AKNER: Right. 

ROSS: In other words, they come in and kind of change the conversation depending on what sort of gravitational force they have as a locus of dialogue, a locus of discussion. 

AKNER: I think that anything that’s good sort of leaves that conversation behind. Like, should Playworld work right now? I do not know. The fact that he’s a child, the fact that he is an abused child— 

ROSS: The fact that it’s the ’80s. 

AKNER: And the way you, the author, are interacting with what seems to be memoir, considering what you include in your bio. It’s like, “What do you want? This was what happened.” Right? 

ROSS: Correct. 

AKNER: And when I hand your book to people, as I have four different times in the last week, I say, “Just read the first sentence.” And then three days later people say, “I haven’t been able to put this down.” I have always been reassured that there are trends; there are ways that things are appropriate, and there are ways that things are what we just months ago called “cancelable.” And the only argument against them was, “Yeah, but you have to read this.” Did I read that it took you 10 years to write this?

ROSS: Yes. How long did Fleishman take you?

AKNER: Six months.

ROSS: Shut up.

AKNER: I did, and it was so awful.

ROSS: That’s amazing.

AKNER: But the thing that slowed me down on Long Island Compromise was knowing how important a book becomes to the world once it’s out in the world. 

ROSS: You finish a book and it’s like a toddler on a plane. It just kind of walks around and encounters people on its own. You have only limited control. In fact, I don’t think you have any control. Going back, though, in terms of the project of Playworld, it’s a book that apes memoir. It’s also a book that, on a certain level, apes a historical novel. But what it’s really trying to do is mine a certain moment in the culture when we just didn’t have language for certain kinds of experiences. There was no language for certain kinds of experiences about predation. There was no language for certain kinds of experiences that now get tagged as narcissism or abuse. When I was working with my editors, we had two polarities of what we felt was almost the sublime. We had the New York sublime. “Central Park, that mood ring in the middle of Manhattan,” or “New York is stitched of two weathers,” because you walk down a sunny street and then walk down a dark and really long, shaded avenue. 

AKNER: I’ve read everything in the world about Manhattan, but the passage about West End Avenue, passing Riverside…well, no one’s ever done that. 

ROSS: Playworld intentionally toggles between Griffin as the narrator, recollecting with tranquility, and Griffin in the present, where you bring him and the reader right up to certain sublime experiences. Griffin doesn’t have the language for these experiences, nor did the culture at that time. It’s a double whammy. He’s a kid and there’s no safety net in terms of how to describe what’s going on. I think this is what insulates Griffin and the book from cultural and critical broadsides. People of that generation recognize it, remembering the freedom they had and how their parents parented. For younger people, it speaks to something almost structural about childhood, and that experience of coming up against experiences you don’t have language for. 

AKNER: It’s undeniable how much you care about each sentence. The most dangerous thing Playworld does is imply Griffin’s complicity in what happens to him by lacking that language. You present it without judgment, parentheticals, or humor, just as a series of facts that allows the reader to remember that strange time between childhood and adulthood. As a child, you’re often asked to be an adult. You’re taking yourself to auditions, working for a living. Why wouldn’t these experiences be part of that? Why wouldn’t your education from a wrestling coach just be new information? 

ROSS: Yes, exactly. 

AKNER: It’s refreshing to read something that reminds you what it was like before experiences were processed, before you had a word for them. My Manhattan children have a similar freedom as you did. The most dangerous thing you do is an Etan Patz joke. It brought me back to the anxiety of a kid our age being taken off the streets and disappearing. It’s like the Challenger jokes—the school just rolls in a TV cart, an explosion happens with the teacher on board, and then they wheel it out and continue teaching. 

ROSS: That’s such a generational experience. I was a college freshman when the Challenger exploded. I remember catching it on the dorm TV, recognizing a world historical event had taken place, and then going off to class. I tried to capture this in Playworld’s treatment of the Reagan assassination: the beginning of the repetition of news, the closest approximation to a proto 24-hour news cycle where you’d look at something over and over. But again, it was a much shorter moment, and the capture of attention didn’t have the same gravitational force.

AKNER: Right. And neither did the John Lennon assassination. It came and it went because nobody was in the business. They were in the business of selling newspapers as opposed to trying to keep you in a 24-hour news cycle. The best thing to ever happen to the TV news was Kuwait. 

ROSS: Which is in Playworld, too. 

AKNER: Being a teenager in the 1980s was so alien to me. I had just missed it, and it seemed like that was the time to have been a teenager. 

ROSS: My kids are so jealous of that, by the way. They constantly talk about how they wish they had that existence. 

AKNER: My kids have freedom. They traverse the world like little adults. Reading this book made me wonder what else they might be experiencing. But they’re also being tracked, and they process everything all the time. It’s so ingrained that they have the language to come home and tell me if a teacher is abusive. But the difference between them and Griffin is that they’re afraid of earnest emotion because it always bites them in the ass. That’s why they call things “cringe.” They’re afraid of feeling something because they realize they’ve been manipulated or the rug is pulled out from under them. They watch a TikTok that makes them feel something, but they’re on their guard. 

ROSS: What do you attribute that to? 

AKNER: TikTok, irony, the fact that they’re the first generation to learn about postmodernism before modernism, irony before earnestness. Kids grow up with an elevated sense of sarcasm and irony, hard-won from a basic education. They’re introduced to the world through irony now, which is a tragedy because they come into the world cynical. 

ROSS: That’s fascinating on so many levels, having raised two daughters, now aged 17 and 18. As a movie lover, I wanted to give them an analog education of depth, not coverage, and I wanted to give them modernism first. I’d make them watch Hitchcock at a young age. My younger daughter, Lyla, went through a Tennessee Williams obsession at nine, which was amazing. But to your point, I remember showing them horror films that shook me to my core, like The Silence of the Lambs, at a youngish but not inappropriate age. I’d say, “This was the scariest movie I’ve ever seen.” And they’d watch while asking, “When’s this going to get scary?” 

AKNER: They already know that the Twin Towers went down, and they already know that there are serial killers everywhere. 

ROSS: There is this collapse of the capacity of a certain kind of art or a certain kind of entertainment to manipulate, grab, terrify, shock, which they’re well beyond. And then when they would show me the kinds of movies that for them are terrifying, I was astonished at their explicitness, their level of gore, their level of hyper-violence. 

AKNER: Misogyny. 

ROSS: Misogyny. It’s intense.

AKNER: That’s what horror has to be, and that’s why we should retire horror. It’s so dark now because the world has revealed such darkness to us. Look at True Crime podcasts and documentaries. 

ROSS: This relates to some stuff in Playworld. I was writing it while raising my kids. By the time I was in the groove, Margot, my eldest, was maybe eight. And I often thought of myself at her age, being raised in cortisol city, getting mugged for the first time at five years old, going to public school in Manhattan with one hour of recess that was just a melee free-for-all, and becoming a wrestler of distinction, essentially learning to take care of myself—I could tell crazy stories about fighting on buses with kids threatening violence–in order to survive. As a parent, you wonder, “How do I teach my kids, growing up in this age of what feels like soft power and hyperemotional fluency and surveillance, the same street smarts I had?” This is a long-winded way of saying that I thought about how the violence, freedom, and vulnerability we experienced as kids in that era, when New York was flat-out dangerous, were the very things that have subsequently kept me safe. My kids and I almost have catechisms about this. Don’t look at your phone on the subway. Sit in the seat behind your Uber driver. It’s no different than distinguishing between a rip and an undertow when we go to Long Island. But of course, you don’t want your kids to go through what you went through to develop that degree of situational awareness. 

AKNER: I’m going to disagree. I think that’s what we think we don’t want, but the ways my children are not having the same experiences I had make me think slightly less of them. When you have a traumatic childhood, you grow up to find that you love your adult life. You can’t separate what your traumatic childhood gave you, so you fall in love with your traumatic childhood. 

ROSS: That’s so interesting. 

AKNER: So when you started writing this book 10 years ago, right after Mr. Peanut, did you know this was going to be your second book? Did you think it might be a memoir? 

ROSS: I had thought about writing Playworld, with the title taped across the top of my computer screen as early as 1999. I wanted to novelize not my childhood per se, but the atmospherics, the strangeness of parenting and being a child in that era. The strangeness of being a child actor, the remarkable osmosis you got by being adjacent to Broadway talent. I was thinking about what it was like to grow up having the entirety of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris memorized because you saw your father perform it so many times. That was a certain kind of literary education, an education on the level of the line. By this time, I’m deep into Mr. Peanut and Ladies and Gentlemen, thinking about my own Künstlerroman, my artistic education. Mine was not the cliched portrait of the artist as a young man. I was no Stephen Dedalus, not a hyperbookish kid. Quite the opposite: an athlete, a child actor, a comics freak. I came at it with the idea that I would begin the novel where Griffin is already damaged, and the second movement would explain why. In the run-up to 2014, when I officially began, I was stuck, in despair. I had what I sold to Knopf, excellent and propulsive pages about Griffin at that later age. But when I tried to move to his backstory, the whole novel ground to a halt. I spoke with a friend, saying, “I can’t find my way into this novel. I think I may have to trash everything.” They asked me to tell them about it. I said, “It’s partly about sexual abuse. I had this fucked up wrestling coach, multiple boundary-less relationships with older women as a child actor. I was adjacent to Broadway at the end of an era. But the crazy thing about all this was it didn’t seem strange at the time.” 

AKNER: “There it is.”

ROSS: They’re like, “That’s a really good line.” So I go up to my study and I’m like, “In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was 36, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.” I wrote the prologue pretty much whole cloth, and literally wrote below it, “We have liftoff.” 

AKNER: The struggle is the lede, the first part. That’s the mission statement, the tone, it’s everything. Sometimes you struggle with it so much. People tell you, “Just write the rest,” but you can’t because you don’t know what it is until you write that first paragraph. 

ROSS: I’m a big believer in that as a narrative strategy. I talk to my staff at the Sewanee Review and young writers at MFA programs about the announcement of that voice, the strong, grab-you-by-the-collar opening. The smartest thing I heard about this was from Quentin Tarantino. He said your average moviegoer sits down to watch a film and is so fluent in visual tropes it’s like they’re on a roller coaster they’ve ridden a hundred times, leaning before the turns. A strong voice and opening cut the balance out from under your reader and they feel they’re in the presence of something new. By the way, one of my writing rules is, “Always hold the reader’s hand.” 

AKNER: I have written two novels, but before that I wrote a million magazine stories in an attention economy of zero, where you could not guarantee that anyone would read to the end, and I needed them to read to the end because the end was where everything was. So how do you get your readers there? You want them to receive the rewards of having stuck through it. One method is starting strong. When you started writing this book, you said you wanted to write about your childhood. But did you know you were going to write about the abuse? 

ROSS: Oh, yeah. 

AKNER: Certain authors I’ve interviewed are offended by the question, “How real was this?”

ROSS: Right. 

AKNER: Is this called autofiction? 

ROSS: Absolutely not. 

AKNER: But what’s the difference between this and autofiction? I’m saying this out of ignorance. 

ROSS: Well, there are several things we could say, which is that autofiction is using some explicit autobiographical tags, like Karl Ove Knausgård’s this-is-me-ness, to make it seem as if there isn’t necessarily any defamiliarization. In other words, [autofiction] likes to play with the degree to which the reader assumes that the book is actually autobiographical. 

AKNER: Right. 

ROSS: Playworld rhymes with my life. Griffin and I share setting, professional milieu, and certain interests. But the abuse I and some of my cohorts suffered went on longer than in the book. The inappropriate relationships Griffin has with older people started much younger. Griffin has access to tutelage and experiences in acting that I never got. There was no tension between my parents and me about acting. There was no moment with my father, who is vastly more successful than Shel Hurt, where I said, “Dad, I’ve got to stop doing this.” This is neither defamiliarized nor bent autobiography. Did I meet Mark David Chapman in Central Park on the weekend before he killed Lennon? No. One thing people don’t understand about novels is that you’re in conversation with something that already exists. Writing a novel is like being in a pitch-dark cave with a gigantic statue you cannot see, spending years feeling it like a blind person feels a face. The novel you write based on what you think that statue looks like is the novel. 

AKNER: The problem with writing things, like in my second novel set in Great Neck with a kidnapping inspired by a famous case involving friends of my family, is when you make somebody slightly identifiable. Then they’re implicated in your fiction. When you write a great novel, people round up on you and see themes everywhere that you may not have planned. Isn’t that the most wonderful thing about readers? 

ROSS: Absolutely. But to my earlier point, it’s your higher brain that puts these themes there. My younger brother, who I speak with every day, was the person I most wanted to read Playworld and was most terrified of reading it. My brother was able to be stunned into enchantment by it because Oren is so different from him. Do they have a spiritual kinship? Absolutely, because my brother called bullshit in a way I was not capable of. 

AKNER: There’s a part in Fleishman that is revealed to be a thing that happened to me. People would say, “I’m sorry that happened to you.” I’d get upset and think, “No, it’s art now.” You’re so forthcoming about the ways these things happened to you maybe in the aggregate. Do you have a hard time talking about the other part as your history, rather than as a subject of the book? 

ROSS: There was an experience that happened that isn’t part of Playworld at all but is important to talk about. When New York State extended the sexual abuse laws and Trinity did their internal investigation, I was approached by another student who experienced this abuse. I worked with a watchdog group called SafeSport to get this coach banned for life from coaching. He was about to be inducted into the New York State Wrestling Hall of Fame. I had been doing this memory exercise when thinking about things in that weird hermeneutic that is memory. “Oh, that’s what was going on at the time. That kid was experiencing that.” There are some dramatic moments here. The person helping us at SafeSport was a former prosecutor, judge, high school and college wrestler. He said, “I need statements from guys you wrestled with against this person.” I got him in touch with 12 to 14 guys, all out there happily married, and I got them to give testimony. The scales were balanced in such a way that I learned sunlight is sometimes the greatest cure. I have no compunction about talking about these things because I’m doing what Griffin couldn’t. I’m introducing language about this stuff into the world in my small, tiny way. It’s not self-aggrandizing, and I don’t think about it as heroic. It’s just balancing the scales.

I remember having a conversation with someone who was a supremely talented middle school wrestler. I have a phrase I love: he had post-pubescent powers in a prepubescent world. He was built like a man in eighth grade and was fucking good. Then he quits the team going into high school. At the time, it didn’t seem strange. I was like, “Why the fuck did he quit? He was so good.” When I started working with SafeSport, I called him up. “Hey, John Doe, it’s Adam. How you doing? I’ve been following your career. Congratulations.” I haven’t spoken to this guy in 35 years. He’s like, “Hey, Adam, I’ve been following your career too, really happy and proud of your success.” I go, “I think you know why I’m calling you right now.” He goes, “I know exactly why you’re calling.” I go, “You quit the team in eighth grade because you were getting abused.” He was like, “That’s exactly why I quit.” 

I’ve got goosebumps right now telling you that story because it was just the total recognition. Some of the things Griffin goes through are a palimpsest of these testimonies. These guys that I ended up getting together and talking with, it was very therapeutic. In the scene where Griffin is losing all that weight, if you want to talk autobiography, the coach who was so pissed off at me for showing up that much heavier made us go to the New York Athletic Club and practice that night. This is the stuff that makes me want to cry. Think about your son going to a two-hour wrestling practice, coming home for a dinner he can’t eat, then going to the New York Athletic Club to do another practice because he’s got to drop 12 pounds in 48 hours. My coach made me sit with several other wrestlers while they ate dinner and said, “We’re going to eat now.” 

AKNER: My God. 

ROSS: Was that stuff in the book? No. And why? There was a way in which the gravitational force of autobiography was the opposite kind of magnet pushing against the magnet of inventiveness and fiction. I see this in your work too and I recognize it. It’s almost pornographic, as in you know it when you see it. It is the lift of pure fiction, that combination of propulsiveness and lightness that exists in pure fiction. Saul Bellow called it the prompter. I call it “La voz.” 

AKNER: La voz? 

ROSS: Spanish for “the voice,” ‘cause it’s literally like a voice is speaking through you, and that’s when you know are surfing the fucking wave. You are operating. 

AKNER: There’s nothing like it. 

ROSS: There’s nothing like it. 

AKNER: Do you read your reviews? 

ROSS: Yeah. 

AKNER: Good, because I don’t believe people who say they don’t. There was an early Kirkus review where the criticism [of Playworld] is that it’s unresolved.

ROSS: Oh my god. Well, that person didn’t read the book. 

AKNER: Or the book happened to that person in a way that they needed answers. Actually, I think it’s a weird compliment. You take such good care of us. They’re like, “How do we not get a chapter about you ending up fine?” Tell me about deciding to limit the book just to the ninth grade, because it’s such an impressive thing to tell that story as an adult. Your book has been compared to The Catcher in the Rye. And I wonder if there was a point where you thought about telling it in the moment instead. 

ROSS: Well, that actually became a technical problem in the early stages. We ended up having Griffin future, the character who announces himself in the point of telling in the prologue, and then what I called Griffin present. The toggling between those two was the way I found I could get to those moments of the sublime without tipping over. If you went too much Griffin future, then you suffered from what my editors and I called knowingness, which dragged the narrative down. And if it was too much Griffin present, it suffered in a very different way from what annoys me about The Catcher in the Rye. I was one of those 13-year-olds when my high school friends were like, “Oh my god, you’re going to read Catcher in the Rye and it’s going to change your life.” I read it multiple times, not from enjoyment. I was like, “This guy annoys the shit out of me.” The irony operates in a pure dramatic irony fashion. It’s only later in life when you understand that Holden is wracked with grief that you really understand that you’re just witnessing a nervous collapse. 

AKNER: What has been the reaction to the book? I know you spoke about your brother and your wrestling teammates. We’re here in New York and you’re going to go visit friends from school after this. 

ROSS: I did get one hilarious text from a high school friend who spent his summers in Quogue and West Hampton and whose settings were the basis for the chapter “Union Buster.” He texted me and said, “How do you remember all this stuff?” But not in a kind of offended, how-dare-you way, more like an appreciation for the rendering and the noticing about the place. I’ve got to say, though, that the most amazing thing has been hearing from writers I didn’t know. 

AKNER: So many people have reached out to you!

ROSS: It’s been incredible. One writer who I won’t name, a great magazine writer, reached out to me and was like, “I always thought I needed to tell some version of this story.” And then he said, “I feel like, now, that story has been told.” To fist bump with certain writers about some of the ways in which the book is operating is one of the most deeply satisfying responses. The same goes for the critics who made me feel totally seen. Whether it was Alexandra Jacobs or Leigh Haber or, unquestionably, Ron Charles, I fucking wept when I read those reviews because I was like, “How fortunate one is when really fantastic critics see you and get what you’re doing.” That just doesn’t happen often. And you know what else I loved? I loved the artfulness of their reviews because it was almost like they were tipping their hats toward the artfulness that they appreciated in Playworld, which goes back to what you wrote me about the sentence-making. And while I don’t think that Playworld is “plot-driven,” I do think it’s hyper-episodic. To me, it does have propulsion and momentum. 

AKNER: Right. Like Lee said, it was 500 pages, but I didn’t want it to end.